A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 
THE CumBriAN ‘SPIRAL’ CROSSES 
We have travelled a long way in the last paragraph, and arrived in 
the midst of a school of art quite strange to the Anglian, and yet 
evidently derived from it—the school of spiral design, not entirely con- 
fined to Cumberland, but nowhere else seen in such development. The 
Roolwer cross in the Isle of Man, and the Maen-y-chwyfan in Flintshire, 
with a very few more, show that the style travelled, but its headquarters 
were here. It was a rustic and debased school of art, although in its own 
way striking out ideas which sometimes became picturesque. The heads 
of the crosses are debased from Anglian of a not very early type; the 
interlacing, where there is any, is not naturalistic (or based on real knot- 
work of straps and cords), but resembles the appliqué interlacing in 
metal-work, in that each segment of the plait is separate, and the groove 
which divides the strand terminates before it tucks under the strand which 
crosses it, nor do the segments truly correspond with one another to 
suggest a continuous cord interwoven. The figures are grotesquely 
debased from the fine Anglian examples, as at Bewcastle ; and the rest of 
the design is neither floral scroll nor key-pattern, but a cluster of spirals 
without symmetry or sense. In a few cases the spirals appear to be on 
the point of blossoming and becoming floral scrolls; they may be a 
faint reminiscence of the Hexham and Bewcastle style ; in most cases 
they are clumsy squarish curves which could never have been regarded 
as intended for floral, but might have been evolved by a lazy imitation 
of the patterns of Irton cross. They resemble the spirals of the Kirk- 
oswald fibula, or the Thames stirrup in the British Museum (Anglo-Saxon 
Room), and contemporary work in filigree; and they suggest that the 
artist was familiar with such metal-work, but not with any examples of 
flower scrolls in stone or in illumination. In some examples they have 
become purely symbolic patterns, the svastika and the triskele, and in 
all cases there is a tendency to fall into these symbolic forms rather 
than to attempt the naturalism of the great Anglian artists. 
There can be no doubt that we have not here a very early school, 
feeling its way to better things and gradually developing into the 
Anglian ; for the debased interlacing is such as could not be produced by 
a nascent art, in which the attempt to copy nature is always traceable. 
Since the models from which this school starts are late Anglian, these 
spiral crosses must be later; and as in some cases they seem to be 
influenced by the Scandinavian school of which we have still to speak, 
we must put them down as probably ninth to eleventh century, later than 
the Anglian, but earlier than the finest Irish-Scandinavian type which 
superseded them, though contemporaneous with the earlier Danish and 
Norse invasions. As they exist chiefly in Cumbria, though also in 
Wales, and in one instance in the Isle of Man, into which the style may 
have been imported from Cumberland, it is reasonable to infer that this 
spiral school was a Cumbrian school, and created by native Cymric artists 
trying to work for Anglian and Danish patrons ; and it is curious that 
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